I’m taking this post as an opportunity to write about the apparently popular request for saved searches and how it could best be implemented into bears ui. While we as users of foobar2000 had to learn 20 years ago in its forum that we should formulate what we wanted to achieve with requested features and less how it should be implemented, bear on the other side is a very ui-focused app. Let me try a suggestion for what I think is a good implementation.
2 preliminary considerations:
- Many users seem to consider the left sidebar a good place to list saved searches. I, on the other hand, think that the almost perfect sidebar, which for me is a trademark of bear, would suffer as a result. In the end, all saved searches would result in an endlessly long list.
- I think the notes list is a better place to store the saved searches. But even in this I would not offer a long list of ALL searches ever saved. There are two reasons why I think this is important: firstly, you don’t have any form of organization at all, and secondly, not every saved search makes sense in every tag selected by the sidebar. Just as an example: If I do a search that includes tags like #vegetarian or #pasta, the search might be useful for the main tag #recipe and all its child tags, but in another context it would be completely pointless. Therefore, I would suggest that each tag and its whole family of subtags can each have its own list of saved searches. To be on the safe side, I would like to mention that the same of course also applies to the sections (All notes, ToDo, Untagged, Today, …). That in my eyes is a simple but yet powerful organization of saved searches. Whoever wants to save a search addressed to all notes could save that search in the notes list of the “notes” section of the left sidebar.
How to implement into the UI?
How to secure a search entered in the search field should actually be the least of a problem. For example, you could place the corresponding command in a menu under the magnifying glass. That command could provide a little dialogue where to give a meaningful name for the search. In my opinion, the decisive factor is rather how you access the saved searches. And here I think that the popup menu that opens automatically under the search field, as can be found in apple notes, offers a nice and elegant solution. Here is a short video to illustrate what I mean:
The advantages I see: The list of saved searches is immediately available as soon as I activate the search, whether with the mouse or hotkey.And a saved search can then be selected just as quickly with the mouse or keyboard. If, on the other hand, even a single character is entered in the search field, the pop-up menu disappears without having to close it beforehand in order to perform a normal search.
Last but not least: How to remove a saved search? When hovering the mouse pointer over a saved search a cross could appear to the right of the name. Also the delete button of the keyboard could be used for that task.